Skirting the lines between academic, promotional and advocacy
organizations, think tanks spend an inordinate amount of time and money
attempting to influence policy debates, all the while being legally
barred from lobbying. Think tanks, unlike interest groups, do not bring
with them electoral constituencies to advocate on behalf of, so the ways
in which they persuade legislators to adopt their opinions cannot
simply be electoral in nature. Using a dataset of think tank citations
from congressional floor speeches and committee testimony records, I
compare the influence of think tanks based on a new measure of their
ideologies and, in doing so, show that think tanks engage in strategic
ideological positioning to maximize their influence. An additional
hypothesis examined is the relationship between think tank members’
previous work experiences in government with the organizations’ overall
prominence. By treating think tanks as strategic actors in legislative
politics, I show that think tanks’ ideological positioning affects
directly how members of Congress engage with them, both by citing them
in floor speeches and in calling them to testify, with more extreme
think tanks being cited more frequently in floor speeches and more
moderate think tanks called more often to testify.

Dr. Lerner is a Postdoctural Research Fellow at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.

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